Jan 19, 2016

Police are investigating a report by a snowboarder that he was shoved out of a chairlift by a skier Sunday at Aspen Highlands in Colorado.

Seth Beckton, the snowboarder, fell face-first 20 to 25 feet, but was fortunate to have landed in soft powder and was not injured. “I honestly thought I was dead,” he told the Aspen Times.

“Because I didn’t know where we were [or how high]. It’s not cool to think anyone would do that.” Beckton, 28, did not report the morning incident until the end of the day, at the urging of friends.

This will make it more difficult for police and ski patrollers to identify and locate the skier. But Aspen Highlands Resort and the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office said Monday that they’re reviewing video and have launched investigations.

“It’s not the kind of behavior we want on our mountain,” Jeff Hanle, spokesman for Aspen Skiing Co., told the Aspen Times.

The skier, a white man in his 20s or 30s, was wearing a helmet and goggles while talking to Beckton on the Loge Peak lift. It was near the top of the lift that the skier reacted to what Beckton thought was an innocuous comment, shoving the snowboarder before he had time to react.

The lift operator stopped the lift, but not until after the skier was able to exit the and ski away. There was a third person on the lift, who thought this was an argument between friends.

Said Beckton: “I was really shooken up. I was like, ‘Was that a joke? Did that really happen?”

Jan 15, 2016

Two Western Australian anglers gained notoriety this week after landing an enormous hammerhead shark and tiger shark from the beach.

Jethro Bonnitcha and Joshua Butterworth, of the Esperance area, released both sharks after posing for photos.

The hammerhead measured 13 feet 6 inches. The tiger shark was not measured but was at least 12 feet long, Butterworth said.

Bonnitcha was handling the rod during both marathon battles, and nearly collapsed from fatigue during the 2.5-hour fight with the hammerhead. Butterworth assisted with the precarious beach landings, and releases.

“You can’t catch sharks like that alone,” he said, via email.

The location was somewhere in “on the mid-west coast” and the lines were baited with large fish and delivered to reef channels.

Butterworth addressed Internet criticism from those who do not appreciate sharks being posed for photos.

"We only bring them out long enough for a photo, and water is still going over their gills,” he said. “Then it's a bit dodgy, but you have to try and lift their pectoral fins and head up and drag them back into the water with a surge of a wave.”

Butterworth later added: “We swim them back out to deeper water and spend as much time as needed to get them swimming off strong, not just swimming off. We don’t have them on the sand for long.”

The Rogue Offshore post was shared more than 2,500 times.

–Photos: Joshua Butterworth (left) and Jethro Bonnitcha with the giant hammerhead; Bonnitcha with the tiger shark; Bonnitcha with the hammerhead; both anglers releasing the tiger shark. Photos courtesy of Joshua Butterworth

Jan 11, 2016

A dorado tagged and released on December 13 off Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, was recaptured 19 days later 500 miles south off the mainland state of Jalisco.

In that time the year-old dorado, a.k.a mahimahi and dolphinfish, grew three inches and gained 8 ounces to weigh 6.5 pounds.

The distance the small fish traveled in that time, while impressive, was not as surprising as the tag being recovered by Gray Fishtag Research, which reported its findings this week.

“The recovery rate for tags in smaller fish like this is small to begin with, but the commercial fisherman who caught this fish was from a tiny Mexican fishing village that I had to look on a map to find,” Gray Fishtag scientist Travis Moore said.

“He was all excited because he saw on that tag that we offer a reward for recovered tags.”

The dorado was named Walter when it was caught off Cabo San Lucas by Kerri Persons aboard El Nuevo, a charter boat operated by RedRum Sportfishing.

Walter was recaptured by Hernan Ramos, a net fisherman out of San Patricio. Gray Fishtag, a budding research company that provides tags to charter fleets around the world in an attempt to learn more about the movements of game fish, sent Ramos clothing and sunglasses.

Dorado are an extremely popular game fish, known for their brilliant colors and their acrobatics on the hook.

They’re also highly prized as table fare and sought by commercial fishermen in Mexico, despite regulations that list them as a sportfishing-only species. Sportfishing and conservation groups have been trying for years to halt what they say is an uncontrolled black market for dorado, and to persuade Mexico to enforce the commercial fishing ban.

They’re hoping that any new research about the species will help their cause.

Moore said he has heard of dorado covering 100 miles in a day, but said they’re more likely to swim about 25 miles per day if the need to travel in search of bait fish exists.

As for Walter, it’s safe to assume that he became dinner the day he was recaptured, despite the commercial fishing ban.

Jan 08, 2016

This week I was informed that a gray whale photographed off Southern California on Jan. 2 is the same whale I photographed last Feb. 1, and that the whale has become quite famous locally because of its distinctive appearance.

Meet "Half-Fluke," who some time ago endured a killer whale attack that resulted in the removal of a large portion of the mammal’s right tail fin.

The cetacean is easily identifiable for researchers such as Alisa Schulman-Janiger, who named Half-Fluke and keeps track of notable marine mammal sightings.

The more times Half-Fluke is documented, the more researchers are able to learn about his or her behavior – and that of migrating gray whales in general.

Last Saturday, Jan. 2, Ryan Lawler photographed Half-Fluke off Newport Beach and asked on Facebook if anyone had ever seen this whale.

Schulman-Janiger matched our photographs with two others showing Half-Fluke off Southern California during the past three years. The whale was photographed showing its fluke on Dec. 29, 2013, off San Clemente in south Orange County by Dale Frink, with Captain Dave’s Dolphin and Whale Safari.

Half-Fluke also was photographed off Long Beach, in Los Angeles County, on January 10, 2015, by Greg Gentry with Harbor Breeze Cruises.